


Time in a Bottle

by AstroGirl



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:05:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's difficult to pass the time, when neither you nor time are moving.  In the end, all you can do is wait.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time in a Bottle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Raven (singlecrow)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/gifts).



> This follows on directly from the final episode, and is spoilery for the end of the series.

They sit across from each other, at a table strewn with chess pieces. There is nothing left for them to do.

"No cracks," she says. "No flaws. Nothing." The trap is perfect. She knew it would be, but that she doesn't say.

"No," he says. His hand makes a fist on the tablecloth. She touches it gently.

"Perhaps Silver..." she says.

"No," he says.

"No," she agrees. The corner of her mouth twists wryly. He does not look amused.

"Let's go over it again," he says. "From the beginning."

Step by step, Steel retraces the path that led them here, a sequence of cause and effect now woven irrevocably into time. Sapphire listens attentively, patiently, responding when he asks her to add or confirm a detail, but they both know the exercise is pointless. What they do or do not understand can make little difference now.

After the sixth repetition, he never mentions it again. Sometimes she wishes he would.

**

Sapphire walks around the café, touching things. Everything here is real. Everything has an origin. She holds a teapot. It's new. 1948. She can see the factory that produced it, can trace its brief timeline to the here and now.

No, she corrects herself. To the here. There is no now. Everything here belongs to 1948, but it is not 1948. Where the year should be, there is only blankness. Nothingness. The sensation disturbs her, like an itching underneath her skin. What disturbs her more is that she is beginning to become used to it.

**

The void outside the window is speckled with stars. Sapphire spends more and more of her time quietly watching them. The light from them is tens of years old, hundreds, more. And yet it never grows any older. Nothing here does, except for her and Steel. Nothing ever can.

**

They don't play chess. Even in the absence of anything else to do, it somehow lacks appeal. The pieces remain scattered across the table where they fell.

**

"It might not be forever," Steel says. "Eventually the universe will end. We might be free, then."

"Mmm," she says brightly. "Well, that will be something to look forward to."

He glances at her sharply to see if she's mocking him, but she only looks back innocently, and after a moment, he snorts.

She grins at him.

"What?" he says, irritation in his voice.

"That's the first time you've laughed since we've been here."

"Yes?" he says. "Well, don't expect me to make a habit of it."

He turns away from her, but for a while, at least, she thinks there's something a little more relaxed in the set of his shoulders.

He's right. He doesn't make a habit of it. But she resolves to help him remember, occasionally, that it's something he knows how to do. Once a century, perhaps. Or what passes for a century here.

**

Most of the time, he doesn't talk without prompting. He simply sits in the corner, his eyes distant, until she asks him a question. "Talk to me, Steel," she'll say. "Tell me what you did before we were assigned together."

"There's not much to tell," he says, and she thinks it must have been very lonely for him.

But that's all right. She can talk for the both of them. "Do you remember the time when...?" she says, and weaves together memories of people, places, assignments. Sometimes she recreates them in her mind and projects them into his, the two of them reliving their past together.

"We did good work," he says once, his eyes no longer distant.

"Yes, we did," she says, and smiles.

**

Sometimes, Steel grows cold. Slowing down the speed of his molecules is much like slowing down time. A reasonable illusion of it, at least. It makes his thoughts slow, his anger slow. She imagines it must be a little like sleep, from what she knows of both phenomena.

She lets him stay like that as long as she can bear it, then goes to him, puts her hands on his shoulders, wakes him with her warmth. He permits her to hold him, then, to brush her lips against his skin. Sometimes he allows more than that. Sapphire has always enjoyed touching in these bodies, Steel less so. But when he thaws, he clutches at her as if these corporeal forms were where they belonged.

It's always over quickly, of course. But then, everything always was.

**

Sapphire wonders what this much time would feel like, if she could sense it properly. Like a crushing weight of rock, perhaps, piling up on them stone by stone. Or like an emptiness that the trickling drops of their lives will never fill. But it feels like neither of those things for her. It simply feels like existence.

**

Once, almost without thinking, she says to him, "If we have to be trapped here, at least there isn't anyone I'd rather be trapped with."

He says nothing. His eyes are focused on the stars. But he stands close beside her and rests his hand on her shoulder, and she finds herself thinking fondly, _Wherever we are, whatever has happened, he's still Steel. Nothing really_ has _changed_.

"Nothing will," she whispers at the void, and the thought doesn't frighten her quite as much as it did.

**

When the end of the universe comes, it finds them standing there together.

"Look at that, Steel," she says, twining her fingers through his. "You were right."

"Yes?" Through the human part of Sapphire's eyes, the end of everything looks like a bright, white light. It shines on his face, painting luminous highlights in his hair. "It isn't quite what I expected," he says.

"No? What did you expect?"

"To be honest," he says, "I always rather thought Time would win. But it hasn't."

"No, it hasn't," she says. "Shall we go and see what has?"

He nods and squeezes her hand.

The café fades away behind them, unnoticed, and they step forward to whatever happens next.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Trick of the Light (The Lining Is Silver Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/389749) by [lost_spook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lost_spook/pseuds/lost_spook)




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